“I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
Weaving through wintertime crowds at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in December, our family chanced upon an artwork I knew nothing about. Six old-fashioned black rotary telephones were perched on glossy white tables. Bold black wall text read “DIAL-A-POEM” in a satisfyingly chunky 400-pica tall, sans-serif typeface.
I turned to Sam方平山 and asked if he could tell us anything about the art. Anything at all. In Mandarin Chinese, of course. Speaking Mandarin is our family’s tradition when we visit art museums. Without missing a beat, Sam方平山 cheerfully launched into this extemporaneous assessment:
Coming clean: V1 and V2
Okay, okay, maybe it didn’t happen quite that way. 🙂 In fact, two days earlier I had first asked Sam方平山 for a reaction video to artist John Giorno’s conceptual, collaborative “Dial-A-Poem.” During that visit, Sam made a video much more in line with what you would expect from a totally unprepared 12-year old improvising in a foreign language on a topic he knows nothing about:
LOL! I told Sam方平山 I thought his video had … “opportunities for improvement”. (Diplomacy!) When we returned to our hotel, I asked Sam方平山 to do some research about John Giorno’s seminal piece from 1968, which cannily anticipated the rise of participatory artworks and distributed information networks. I asked Sam方平山 to think carefully about what he wanted to say about the art, and write himself a more informative script.
Sam方平山 spent an hour or so doing his research, writing his little speech in Hanzi, and practicing it a few times. We returned to MoMA two days later to record the video you see at the head of this article. Chinese was written, Chinese was spoken, Chinese was practiced. I do so love a happy ending!
Sam方平山 has been making response videos to art for years now. The process and production in this particular example was relatively elaborate. Don’t let that intimidate you. Our Mandarin learning journey through the world’s great art museums started in very simple, easy, and fun ways. In this article I will show you step-by-step how art museums can help your learner build language fluency, and connect you to a large and generous Chinese-speaking community.
Art museums as prompts for learning languages… any language
Long, long before Mandarin Chinese education was on our parental radar, we carried little Sam around great contemporary art museums and asked him in English what he thought the various artworks depicted. As a toddler, Sam’s responses were hilarious, particularly when we challenged him with abstract, conceptual, and non-representational art. Little Sam had such an imagination, and would extract deep meaning from the most nebulous scribbles. If you have a toddler handy, I encourage you to give this a try, using whatever language you prefer. What you will find is that art motivates the production of language.
Art museums are perfect language prompts. They are information-dense. They are engineered to surprise. Art museums actively and passively ask important questions. They tend to be riotously colorful. They invariably challenge orthodoxy, stereotypes, assumptions, and prudes. Art engages human passions and emotions. Language is a natural response.
Growing up with art: a handy how-to
So let’s say you’ve had some coffee, your kids had their fill of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, you’ve arrived at your friendly neighborhood art museum, and you’re ready to learn some Mandarin Chinese. For absolute beginners, you can do the same sorts of activities you would do to teach a baby the English language.
Absolute beginners: starting with colors and numbers
Start the learning journey by finding a work of particularly colorful art. Announce what colors you see in the art, in easy Mandarin:
| 红色 | 紅色 | hóng sè | red |
| 蓝色 | 藍色 | lán sè | blue |
| 彩虹色 | 彩虹色 | cǎi hóng sè | rainbow-colored |
Eventually your kid will start parroting your responses, and will try to “beat” you at the color identification game as you stand in front of each new artwork. Encourage that competitive instinct! For each fast response, you could offer a prize: a piece of candy, or some Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, or a minute of unrestricted tablet time.
When your learner is ready, you can say short sentences and ask them simple questions, slowly escalating difficulty and introducing grammar and idioms:
| 什么颜色 | 什麼顏色 | shénme yánsè? | What color? |
| 那只猫是什么颜色的？ | 那隻貓是什麼顏色的？ | Nà zhǐ māo shì shénme yánsè de? | What color is that cat? |
| 这张图片你最喜欢什么颜色? | 這張圖片你最喜歡什麼顏色 | Zhè zhāng túpiàn nǐ zuì xǐhuān shénme yánsè? | What is your favorite color in this picture? |
| 哇，五色缤纷! | 哇，五色繽紛! | Wa, wǔ sè bīn fēn! | Wow, a profusion of colors! |
| 我的感觉是，格哈德·里希特对红色的运用是超越常规的。 | 我的感覺是，格哈德·里希特對紅色的運用超越了慣例。 | Wǒ de gǎnjué shì, gé hā dé·lǐ xī tè duì hóngsè de yùnyòng shì chāoyuè chángguī de. | My feeling is that Gerhard Richter’s use of the color red is transgressive. |
You can also use the artwork as a medium to teach numbers and comparatives:
| 三个茶壶 | 三個茶壺 | sān gè cháhú | Three teapots |
| 我看到三个苹果 | 我看到三個蘋果 | Wǒ kàn dào sān gè píngguǒ | I see three apples |
| 哇, 梵高先生只有一只耳朵 | 哇, 梵谷先生只有一隻耳朵 | Wah, fàn gāo xiānshēng zhǐyǒu yī zhǐ ěrduǒ! | Wow, Mr. Van Gogh only has one ear! |
| 莫內畫的畫比達文西還多。 | 莫內畫的畫比達文西還多。 | Mò nèi huà de huà bǐ dáwèn xī hái duō. | Monet painted more pictures than Da Vinci. |
If your Mandarin Chinese is nonexistent, as ours was at the start of our family’s Mandarin Chinese language learning journey, don’t let that inability be an excuse. Your kids can still learn native-level, perfect pronunciation with your help. Pull out your mobile phone and use a Chinese dictionary app like Hanping Chinese or Google Translate to pronounce this vocabulary accurately.
Low-intermediate learners: encouraging impromptu speech
Eventually the need to continually prompt and support your learner will fall away, and they will be able to describe artworks and tell little stories on their own. At this stage, kids will tend to speak slowly as they attempt to recall the necessary vocabulary to describe a particular piece of art. Our experience is that art served as a helpful visual prompt to help Sam produce the language. Language will be simple and descriptive, with a lot of colors and nouns, as you see in these videos:
Intermediate learners: The case for silly storytelling
Kids love nothing more than to be a little transgressive. You can leverage this love of “naughty” as you encourage your kids to practice their Chinese and improve their expression. From an early age I encouraged Sam to invent ridiculous fictional back-stories for these works of art. He would come up with these stories on the fly while standing in front of the artwork.
Over a span of a few years, Sam方平山’s vocabulary and expression became more noticeably more sophisticated. The stories and tall tales remained as silly as ever.
Involving non-speaking family with interviews
I encourage you to involve non-speaking family members as your learners pursue Mandarin fluency. Mrs. Tigerdaddy supports us in our Mandarin learning journey, but she doesn’t speak any Mandarin Chinese. Non-speakers can still be part of the fun. In this video, she interviewed Sam in English, while Sam responded improvisationally in Mandarin Chinese. Asking language learners to simultaneously process two languages will build their confidence and fluency. It is also likely to amuse everyone involved in the exercise.
Art museums as prompts for high-intermediate and advanced learners
If you stick with Mandarin education, you will reach a point where your learner can intuitively produce fluid speech with accurate pronunciation and wide-ranging vocabulary. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re finished teaching.
In America we continue to teach fifth-grade English-speaking kids higher forms of English expression despite the fact that they can already produce fluid English speech. Over the course of many years English-speaking kids learn the importance of careful word choice, literary devices like allusion and foreshadowing, principles of quality rhetoric like repetition and parallelism, and the process of careful planning that goes into effective writing.
Parents who have reached a place of reasonable fluency with their Mandarin-speaking kids have an opportunity to push them toward higher forms of written and spoken expression. Art museums can provide a framework for Mandarin learners to practice their craft.
My feeling is that Sam方平山 has a decent start with his Mandarin, but he still has a long, long way to go in his language learning journey. The video at the start of this article, where Sam is describing John Giorno’s “Dial-a-Poem”, represents one of Sam’s first baby steps into higher-level expression. He was asked to do a little research, think about the artwork and the ideas underlying it, and consider carefully the structure of his speech.
Contemporary art museums provide fertile ground for growing higher-level expression in Mandarin learners. Contemporary art is primarily about engaging viewers to ideas, history, and experience, using visual forms as the pathway into this rich inner world. Engaging your learner to the universe of ideas expressed through art will make them smarter, more empathic, and more fluent.
Art museums as a forum to meet the Chinese-speaking community
Talking to parents new to Mandarin education, they tend to have similar questions:
- How can I establish a network of Mandarin-speaking friends?
- How can I find Mandarin-speaking playdates for my kids?
- How can I find other parents who care about Mandarin Chinese education in the same way that I do?
- And how can I make these personal connections without feeling incredibly awkward? This is a particular concern for the many parents and caregivers who have a poor or nonexistent ability to speak Mandarin Chinese.
My experience is that the answer to all of these questions is to be found in museums, and your Mandarin-speaking child will be your unlikely social ambassador!
All of the videos I’ve linked on this page have involved very brief public performances by my son, typically thirty seconds to a minute long. Other museum-goers notice those little performances. Parents who are trying to teach their own kids Mandarin Chinese are invariably attracted by the sound of another kid trying to express themselves in a language that they value. As your child increases in fluency and expression, this attention from strangers will increase. Both kids and adults will approach you, asking you for online resources, lesson providers, travel tips, Mandarin-language playdates, and clear direction in their own Mandarin learning journeys.
If you speak it, they will come: Solving a problem of etiquette
Allowing other people to come to you and speak Chinese first also solves a problem of etiquette. In our experience the overwhelming majority of people who speak Mandarin Chinese are wildly enthusiastic to talk with a young learner who is making a serious effort to learn the language. But a very few people are not, and will greatly resent anyone speaking to them uninvited in a non-majority language. That feeling should be respected.
Allowing other Mandarin language speakers to come to you first entirely solves this dilemma of etiquette. People who wish to communicate in Mandarin Chinese will approach you generously. People who don’t for whatever reason will never opt-in to the conversation. Nobody ends up in a conversation and speaking Mandarin Chinese who doesn’t really want to be.
We have made good friends from all over the world by using art museums as a forum for language practice. We’ve met people at San Francisco’s SFMoMA, and then traveled to Guangdong, China to spend days with them. Great cities like Shanghai and Taipei have wonderful art museums, and very interesting people tend to visit them. Chinese-speaking people have generously invited us into their homes, offices, restaurants, factories, vineyards, and villages, and of course we have reciprocated these kind invitations. In the process of language learning, we have built a strong network of Chinese-speaking friends and adopted family all over the world, despite the fact that we ourselves have no Chinese heritage.
Art museums love language learners
Do museum staff care if you film performative little videos in their public art galleries? Assuming they allow a particular artwork to be photographed at all, my experience is that museum staff and executives have no concerns whatsoever with this activity, and indeed will often encourage it. Discussions of art at a high or low levels lies squarely within the missions and goals of art institutions. In the process of making these videos, a new generation of learners and donors is seeing the art, learning about art, and slowly but surely learning a sophisticated vocabulary to talk about it.
We’ve had several experiences where a senior curator or museum director overheard us talking about artworks in Mandarin Chinese, and approached us to offer additional insights into the art in question. Museums will love seeing your learner engaging to the art.
Check your privilege: museum opportunities for low-income and no-income learners
My mom was a Navy wife who picked up spare change for our family by ironing sailor’s shirts for ten cents apiece. She did this labor while working toward two Master’s degrees, which she leveraged into a long professional career. I’m keenly sensitive to the fact that language learning can be expensive, and that a twenty dollar museum entrance fee may be a totally unattainable luxury for many families.
The good news is that 1,400 American museums participate in a program called Museums for All. If you receive SNAP EBT food assistance benefits, you and your family can receive extremely discounted admission simply by presenting your SNAP card. Up to four people can receive museum admission for prices ranging from free to $5 a person for each SNAP card you present. Some of the world’s greatest museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) participate in the Museums for All program.
One recurring theme for tigerba.com is going to be exploring ways that readers can help themselves become fluent, literate, and very well-traveled for little or no money. Sure, you can spend $15,877.99 on language lessons, and those lessons will help greatly if you take them seriously. But spending a wad is no guarantee of fluency, nor is expendable income a prerequisite for language attainment. If you have the gifts of Internet access, some kind of computer, and some free time, you live in a golden age for language learning. Avail yourself of this rare opportunity.
Postscript: What’s that cool image in the webpage header?
That’s a picture of me and Sam方平山, perhaps five years old, exploring the “Rain Room” together. The “Rain Room” is an experiential artwork by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass that involves a darkened room filled with falling rain. A single spotlight illuminates the scene in high contrast. As you walk through the room, it rains everywhere except the spot where you and your companion happen to be walking. Poetic and romantic. We’ve seen the “Rain Room” in a few world museums, including Shanghai’s Yuz museum in 2015.
Our favorite art museums and art spaces for language learning
The museums listed below are particularly engaging places to explore language learning. If you have favorite museums to suggest, please leave a comment below! You can also drop me an e-mail anytime at [email protected]
SFMoMA (San Francisco, California)
De Young Museum of Art (San Francisco, California)
Walt Disney Family Museum (San Francisco, California)
LA County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, California)
Getty Museum (Los Angeles, California)
Bellagio Conservatory (Las Vegas, Nevada)
Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois)
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, Washington)
Dali Museum (St. Petersburg, Florida)
National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.)
Hirshhorn Museum(Washington D.C.)
Museum of Modern Art (New York City)
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City)
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
Brooklyn Museum (New York City)
MoCA Taipei (Taipei, Taiwan)
Tate Modern (London, England)
The Hamburger Bahnhof museum (Berlin, Germany)
Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin, Germany)
Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, the Netherlands)
Aurora Museum (Shanghai, China)
West Bund Museum (Shanghai, China)
Power Station of Art (Shanghai, China)
Long Museum of Art (Shanghai, China)
Tank Shanghai (Shanghai, China)
Modern Art Museum MAM (Shanghai, China)
Yuz Museum (Shanghai, China)
Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong, China)
M+ Museum of Art (Hong Kong, China)
Disclosures on referrals
The integrity of my reviews and recommendations on tigerba.com matter to me.
Some people attempt to make a low-level business shilling various online services on their blogs. As a website owner, you can earn referral bonuses from companies by steering readers to buy stuff. The availability of these referral bonuses is one reason that there are so many short, superficial reviews of language learning apps online — there is some money to be made.
Picking up spare change from the language learning community isn’t really my motivation for writing any of this up. What I most value through writing are the connections I make in the language learning community. Those connections will help me teach both of my children Mandarin Chinese more effectively.
To my knowledge, there aren’t any referral links in the article above. There are referral links elsewhere on tigerba.com. If you buy things using referral links on tigerba.com, companies may eventually send me some money, or perhaps some free lessons for Sam方平山 and Thomas小方糖. Using these links doesn’t cost you anything. Any money I make from referrals will go to pay the many bills for this website. To date I have spent thousands of dollars setting up this website, buying future-looking website plug-ins, and paying for website hosting.
At present, tigerba.com is a money-losing enterprise and I’m perfectly happy with that. But tigermama虎妈 tells me it would be a nice thing to offset a few of its costs.
Disclosures on AI and plagiarism
I like the process of writing in the old-fashioned way and don’t presently use any form of AI to write my articles.
From time to time I’ve heard accusations of alleged plagiarism between competitor language learning blogs. I’ve solved that potential problem by generally not reading other language learning blogs.
Avoiding other people’s writing about Chinese language learning helps me to keep my writing, my coverage, and my perspective fresh. I can write freely without worrying that I may have inadvertently borrowed someone else’s ideas, language, priorities, coverage, or point of view.
